Orna Lalo

I was born in 1960, studied art in Kalisher school and “HaMidsrsha”, and fashion design in Shenkar school. After finishing my studies I was active mainly in commercial design, a particularly exciting time for me. I built a successful brand, “Orna Lalo Treasures”, that designed, produced and marketed accessories and home-décor from specialty plastics that I developed. After 20 years I closed down the business, and am now in the stage of restarting, finishing Master of Arts in the Holon Institute of Holon (HIT).

I am an obsessive collector of everything. I leave nothing – scenes, smells, sounds, textures, words, a passing movement, a repeating rhythm, rags, discarded stuff that people left, forgot, told as secrets, books I am reading, that they too are entirely disordered, fiction, politics, science, history, architecture, bee keeping. You could say that I am a conceptual vacuum cleaner.  
 

This  mixture which I feed diligently and constantly is shaking independently in my mind. When I choose to work on a certain idea, it is enough to mention a few key words and phrases for the slot machine that is my brain to start making connections, build contacts, emit ideas as I go along.

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The core of my work is usually a conceptual thought: an abstract idea, a phrase, a form, a movement, a textual feeling, sound or color. The initial sketch will hold a pure distillation of the image – a feeling or an idea, an initial attempt to conceptualize the abstract moment. Only after this is achieved will I add form, color, shape. The development itself is a complex process, days and months of research and experimentation. Some concepts never materialize into form and I carry them with me for years.

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Technique for me is a means to express an idea. During the crystallization of the idea and during the research I find myself often in an endless loop. Touching the material substances clarifies my thoughts and raises questions – does this technique suit the core of the work? What would be the overall appearance that would form? From such questions the concept clarifies and solidifies into a complete whole. There is also the personal dimension; like a singer or a dancer, where their art flows from their body, so it is with me, during the physical work my mind works independently on the materials, the concept and the personal aspects, edits and formulates them.

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The Field”, a work , is part of my submitted thesis for MA. It is a work that developed with me for a long time. I live in a farming village and go walking every day with the dogs around the wild areas surrounding the houses. Every day I see new events: something new begins to grow, taking the place of something else that withered, ants building a new nest – new trails are being formed. I walk around, feeling lucky to be a small part of a large system, a part of the flora and fauna. I too create small trails but mainly I am watching, observing. The transient nature of everything gives me a strong sense of beauty: precisely because it is all so temporary and does not belong to me.

 

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For a long time I carry a feeling of urgency to document these feelings. To memorialize the memory and feeling, from the thought that everything is disappearing. To do something so that I will not remain a single observer, alone. “The Field” is an attempt to express my personal-sensory experience and to reproduce the experience of wonder at the mechanisms of the plants and the animals. This through synthetic representation through motion, sound, light, textual elements and mechanical parts. 

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“He knew that you could also like this world without being at its center, and that beauty does not have to emanate from the happy ending, but from that mere act of observing” (from: Requiem to a Bird, by Alex Hankin). 

When you are out walking in the countryside, in nature, a sentence like that changes your consciousness. The landscape I show is in a way a summary and distillation of these experiences.